Patr. Daniel: The Christian Family Feels and Confesses the Love of the Most Holy Trinity

Photo: Basilica.ro / Raluca Ene

This year, International Children’s Day coincides with the Seventh Sunday after Holy Pascha (dedicated to the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council), while Parents and Children’s Sunday – the first Sunday after June 1st, established by the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church through Decision no. 629 of March 12, 2009 – coincides with the feast of Pentecost, or the Descent of the Holy Spirit.

The Gospel reading for the Seventh Sunday after Pascha, which recounts the prayer of our Lord Jesus Christ for the unity of the Church, spoken shortly before His Passion (John 17:1–13), reveals to us God as the Father of an eternal Son, Who came into the world to give humankind eternal life.

Created in the image of an eternal Communion – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (see Genesis 1:26–27) – and called to partake in the glory of the Most Holy Trinity, man can only be perfected in a state of communion of love and eternal life.

Through the Descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and the baptism of 3,000 people (see Acts 2:1–47), Pentecost is the feast of the foundation of the Church of Christ, as the gathering of Christians in the love of the Most Holy Trinity.

Therefore, the Church is the union, through divine grace, of human persons created by God with the uncreated divine Persons. The model of unity for the Church is not of this world, but the Most Holy Trinity, as revealed in the Son’s prayer to the Father: “And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one” (John 17:22).

There is a deep connection between the mystery of Christ’s Church and the mystery of the Christian family (Ephesians 5:32). As Saint John Chrysostom says, the family is “the domestic church,” where the child first experiences the mystery of God’s parental love for mankind and learns filial and fraternal love at home, which then continues in the parish church as filial and fraternal love in Christ.

The fact that God the Son was born as Man, through the action of the Holy Spirit, from the Virgin Mary and grew up in a family, being loved by the Mother of God and by the Righteous Joseph, His adoptive father, explains why key spiritual terms in the Church, such as spiritual father/brother/son and mother/sister/daughter, are taken from the vocabulary used to describe members of the conjugal family.

When the family lives in harmony, love, and unity, it becomes a light and an icon of the work of the grace of the Most Holy Trinity. On the other hand, the weakening of faith and love within the family leads to the weakening of the family’s bond with the Church, and the weakening of this bond leads to spiritual poverty.

For a true Christian life – spiritual, moral, and communal – it is essential to live and confess the faith in the Most Holy Trinity, as formulated in the Orthodox Creed by the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (325) and the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople (381).

To support the family today, it is urgently necessary to defend the innocence of children and to affirm the dignity of the family in society, including by strengthening cooperation between the State and the Church in all fields related to educational, cultural, and social activities concerning the family.

At the 1700th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, with deep esteem and fatherly blessing, we urge parents and children to live and confess the right faith in the family, in the Church, and in society, and to cultivate love for God and for fellow human beings, through prayer and good deeds!

† DANIEL
Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church

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